A Million Aunties

by Alecia McKenzie

  Percy Sledge was on the car radio when Eileen and I drove from Firenze to Waterloo for our first date, if I can call it that, a picnic by the lake. I wasn’t on the road long before I noticed the car, a sheriff’s patrol, trailing us. I kept driving at a normal speed in the Falcon, while the car behind kept the same distance. When we parked by the lake, he parked too. When we got out, he stayed in the car. Watched us as we spread a blanket, laid out the chicken, greens, and rice and peas Eileen had prepared. She didn’t know then how much I hated rice. We’d met just three weeks before, five months after I got back from Nam, and there was still a lot to discover about each other.

  The jackass in his khaki hat and uniform sat while we had our picnic, looking at us through his car window as if we were rare birds, or maybe the ghosts of Indians come back to haunt Waterloo. They’d had to pass this way when they got forced onto reservations, right? Trail of Tears. Marching, marching with so many falling by the way. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the jackass had taken out binoculars, or a rifle. I tried not to be nervous, but Eileen was simply annoyed. She hadn’t grown up here, hadn’t been in the country long enough yet. She wanted to go over and give him a piece of her mind, ask him what he thought he was playing at. No sheriffs sitting in cars watching people in Kaya Bay, where she came from.

  “Maybe I should just go and offer him some rice and peas,” she said. I couldn’t help it, I had to laugh. That was the thing that drew me to Eileen. She made America funny. But a long time later, when she kept smiling, calling the racists “fools,” it only made me irate. It was as if she couldn’t see beyond the foolishness, to the wickedness. You can’t just laugh at everything, no matter how you see history, I used to tell her. And she would make that sound I grew to know too well, the infuriating one, kissing her teeth. “They not going to turn me into what they want” was her mantra. “Nobody changing me to fit their own stupidity.” She pronounced it “chew-pidity.” Deliberately. To show where she came from. We would argue then, about race, of all things. Arguing, when she should have been in full agreement with me.

  “The thing with you and your people, Herb, is that you keep on hoping the country will change and that one day they’ll start loving you,” she declared. “They not going to change. So you might as well just live your life—enjoy what America has to offer, and ignore them.”

  That got me really worked up. Easy to say if you don’t have anybody to ignore, I told her, but when they’re there all the time and one wrong move on your part could see you in jail or in the morgue, then it’s a different matter.

  But there was no sense arguing with her. She was always right. The arrogance and confidence of growing up as a majority. The shortsightedness of it.

  She got truly angry once, though, in ’83, but I’ll come to that.

  Chris is more like her than me, imbibing her “don’t let them define you” rubbish, as if that would save him when a sheriff pushed him against a wall. He acts as if he’s from the other side. Take the art thing. I don’t even want to get into that now. He could’ve been like Magic or Michael, could’ve taken care of his mother and me, not that I would’ve ever asked him for anything. But Eileen was always: let him do what he wants to do. Except some of us don’t have that luxury.

  If I could’ve done what I wanted to do, I would have walked over to that sheriff that September Sunday and dragged him from his power-bubble. I would have smashed him to the ground and kicked him until he screamed for his momma.

  But we can’t all go around doing as we wish. Eileen and I finished our picnic. I acted like I wasn’t rushing when we wrapped things up and put the basket and blanket in the trunk. I wanted to be out of Waterloo before the sun began going down.

  He trailed us the twenty-two miles back to Firenze. I turned the radio up high, and Eileen and I sang along to “When a Man Loves a Woman.”

  I haven’t been back to Waterloo since. I heard that the sheriff there is now black and the mayor is a woman—for the second or third time. When we lived in Firenze, Waterloo had maybe three hundred people, all lily white. To get there and to Pickwick Lake, you’d have to drive along a narrow road, with the Tennessee River on one side and woods on the other, hiding the houses. A few years after our picnic, my homeboy Les was out there late one evening, I have no idea why, and his car broke down in the darkness. He couldn’t get it to start. So he ventured through the woods, praying the whole time, and knocked on the door of the first house he came to. A white man, about sixty, opened the door, stared at him, and asked what he wanted. When Les explained, the man went back into the house and came out with tools and a flashlight. He followed Les to the car. Looked at the engine and said the radiator was overheating. He opened the cap and let off the steam, and they stood side by side just staring at the metal workings. When Les got on his way, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw the man standing there in the road with his flashlight. Les was trembling.

  We all thought he was damn lucky, especially because Les is 6'2", and people like to feel intimidated by tall people. When a bunch of us, me and Les and others, used to walk home after high-school team practise, we’d get jittery stares, although everyone guessed we were basketball players. But that’s the thing with crackers, you never know how they’ll behave on any given day. And you just don’t know when you’ll meet one who’s burning with hatred for everybody, but mostly for you.

  Firenze had its share of them, but they never would’ve done anything like in Birmingham or Selma. You got the looks and the words, ever so often, but not the crimes. Things had changed by the time I got back from Nam anyway and a lot of us were getting on okay. It seemed people were closer than before I left, like some were really trying, sorry for things that had happened in the past. Maybe cussing against the war had united them, or all the assassinations, I don’t know. The thing was, nobody wanted to hear my views, or what I’d been through. Not that I would’ve talked about it, if they asked. My two sisters Ella and Doreen were teachers, like Momma had been, sharing a nice house on Maple, and most of their friends had decent jobs and nice sports cars. On Sunday, everyone went to church and held up those the spirit took, or made sure they got the spirit themselves and began with the shaking and wailing. I went a few times after I got back and then stopped going. But that’s where I met Eileen. Call it Divine will.

  The pastor had asked Eileen out a couple of times before she went out with me, and maybe that’s why I got the distinct impression that I was no longer welcome in his House of Worship. Pastor Samuels was a divorced man, with an eight-year-old son, and I think he was looking among the flock for a stepmother for his boy. Eileen would’ve been a fine choice. She had one of those smiles, the kind that people with good teeth like to flash, and she was always in a dress. I soon learned that she was staying with an aunt, over on Chestnut, who was a dressmaker, able to make clothes from scratch—even entire suits, jackets and all. This aunt had filed for Eileen to come to the States, when Eileen’s mother passed from cancer, and there she was now, amidst us by the Tennesee River, in the Shoals.

  “Did your aunt choose this area because of all the water?” I asked Eileen. I figured that to live in Kaya Bay or anywhere on an island, you’d learn to love the sea, rivers, any kind of water.

  “No, she just met a man who came from the South. He was a tourist. They moved here so they could be together.”

  Turned out that her aunt’s husband, the late Uncle Tommy, was born white. He pretended for years to be a light-skinned black man, the only time in my life up until then I’d ever heard of that. He always shaved his head close to the scalp, Eileen said, until he went bald and it wasn’t necessary anymore. Tommy had come from Troy, down near Montgomery, and they chose Firenze on a whim after they drove through on their way north. Nobody knew him here. Nobody suspected. So he just recreated his life so they could live together without hassle from racists. Eileen told me this as if it was the cutest thing in the world, like an Anansi scam.

  Anansi the spider. When Chris w
as little, Eileen used to tell him these stories all the time. Once upon a time, she went, Anansi was hungry, very very hungry, but so were his wife and their three children. They kept bawling and rubbing their empty bellies. Anansi had no choice but to head out in search of food. But first he looked through his closet for his best clothes and put on his one suit and tie. He knew that if he looked poor, people wouldn’t give him much, because they would just think he wasn’t used to having anything. But if he looked wealthy, people would think, Oh, poor man, down on his luck. Let me help him. So all dressed up, Anansi went from farm to farm and spun tales about being temporarily out of money and needing to feed his family. Everyone who listened to him felt moved, and they put bananas, oranges, mangoes, yam, plantains, and all kinds of food into his basket. He raced home later, handing over everything to his wife and kids. As they dug in, he sat there eating nothing himself. So, they all felt sorry for him, and each gave him half of what was on their plate. Anansi of course ended up with the biggest share, which he somehow always managed to do. He smacked his lips and grinned as he ate. Tomorrow he would have to think of a different trick.

  I didn’t know what she was trying to teach Chris with these stories, so I just kept my mouth shut. I wondered if her Aunt Veronica had told Tommy some Anansi tales before he decided on his lifelong transformation. But as Eileen said, to each his own. Everyone who knew him said Tommy had been a good man.

  Anyway, there was Eileen, a bird of paradise on the water. My sisters laughed that it was a wonder I hadn’t come home with a Vietnamese. But here I was, still going foreign.

  I loved the dresses she wore, all made by her Aunt Veronica, all with a fitted cut and tasteful colours—black and red, lime green, burgundy. And never above the knees. I can’t remember ever seeing her in pants that whole time. Dresses made her feel freer, she said. With her petite frame, she sometimes looked like a doll.

  Just a week after arriving in Firenze, she’d found a job as a receptionist with Stanley White, owner of White’s Funeral Home, and that’s where she was working when we met. Stanley was the richest black man in town. He knew how to get money out of you even before you were ready to pass to the other side. I would laugh when I went to pick up Eileen sometimes after work and see the sign he had put up in big bold black letters: Inquire about our new prepaid, prearranged funeral plan.

  Stanley was short, round, and balding, an alligator in business but a poodle in private apparently. Eileen said he gave away a lot of his money, for scholarships. That kind of thing. And she could always count on a bonus during a good month of funerals. He sometimes invited us for a barbecue at his house—a two-storey place with a huge yard in front and back, across the bridge from Firenze, in the Shoals itself. He probably had a good view of the river from the second floor, but we were never invited upstairs. His wife, Ursuline, was a head taller, and half his width, with a striking crown of straightened hair, or maybe a wig, now I come to think of it. She had a booming laugh that rang through the neighbourhood. Another woman with excellent teeth, though hers seemed bought. They were all too even, too ivory. When you have crooked front teeth yourself, you notice these things. I felt she and Stanley were good folks, yet there was something that told you not to get too close. Maybe it was the smell of death-wealth hanging over the place. And I wondered why they needed such a big house, when it was just the two of them. No kids.

  We hadn’t seen Stanley for years after we left Firenze, and then he turned up at Chris’s first big show, in Brooklyn. For some reason, Eileen had sent him an invitation and since he was going to be in town anyway—a morticians’ convention—there he was.

  “Still so beautiful! You haven’t changed a bit,” he told Eileen, wrapping her in a hug that went on for too long. They were both exactly the same height.

  “Nor you, Mister Stanley,” she answered. “You look younger than when I was working for you.” He beamed like the moon, turning to shake my hand and looking me up and down. I guess I didn’t look that great because he didn’t comment on my appearance. His head barely reached my shoulder, and I pulled myself up to be even taller.

  “You must be so proud of your son,” he said, looking over to where Chris was standing, talking with the gallery owner. “Art was something I always wanted to do, back in the day.”

  Fancy that, I thought. And instead you make dead bodies look beautiful. “Yeah. I am. Proud,” I said out loud.

  “I always knew Chris would do great,” he went on. “I could see the talent from back then.”

  Sometimes, when Eileen still had work to do, she would take Chris to the funeral home after school, and he would entertain himself by drawing everything in sight, which was mostly coffins. It seems good old Stanley had been tickled to bits that Chris liked to portray his shiny, expensive caskets. He even gave him advice on how to make them look more realistic. This I was hearing for the first time.

  Stanley bought the most expensive painting in the exhibition, a huge rectangle with a lot of thick black lines. Perfectly suitable for a mortician’s home. “Ursuline will love it,” he said, and I could see his wife’s perfect false teeth gleaming as her laugh echoed up the East Coast.

  After Stanley left, I gave Chris’s paintings another look. If someone was willing to spend that kind of money, maybe I was missing something.

  From the moment your kid comes into the world, you start building dreams for them in your head, start wanting them to become what you maybe couldn’t. I can only think this now. I wasn’t conscious of it before. Chris was born a year and a half after Eileen and I got married and by then the VA had found me a job as a sound engineer at the recording studio, where everybody who was a true professional came. I’d got training for radio work in the military, for dealing with mikes and dials, making sure a sound was as clean as it could be. I wanted my singers, as I called them, to sound better than anybody else on the radio. Millie was one of the most demanding regulars, but I didn’t mind when she flashed her long, red, false nails, stared out from under the false lashes, and said she wanted more bass. “Turn that shit up, Herb,” she’d rasp out, as if she’d smoked two packs of cigarettes a day all her life. If you didn’t know her and only spoke to her on the phone, the deep voice would make you think she was a man. I helped record her “KMA (Kiss My Ass) Rhapsody,” which became a huge hit at parties, though they wouldn’t play it on some stations. It’s in the box with the others. They all signed their albums for me. So if Chris sells them, he could probably make a pretty penny. That’s one of Eileen’s sayings. So-and-so could make a pretty penny doing this or that. I used to tease her, “A one-hundred-dollar bill is a lot prettier than a damn penny.” I set aside a couple hundred every month for Chris’s college fund, pleased to watch it grow.

  When he started kindergarten, we bought a three-bedroom place, two doors down from my sisters, and settled in on quiet Maple. Besides Eileen and Chris, my sisters Ella and Doreen were all the close family I had. We lost Pops in a car crash when I was in junior high. And Momma passed when I was in Nam. I found out five weeks after the funeral.

  On Saturdays, I sometimes drove around to see if anyone was playing ball, so I could join in, even if I couldn’t move the way I used to. Occasionally, a guy I didn’t know might ask about the limp. “What happened to your leg, Herb?”

  “Got shot,” I told him. “Try not to let it happen to you.”

  On Sunday, Eileen and Chris rode with my sisters to church while I stayed home or hung out with my buddy Les. He was married now too, and his wife visited her folks every Sunday. He didn’t accompany her because he had the feeling her brothers and father didn’t like him. Les had disappeared from Firenze for a long while, right after graduation. No one knew where he’d gone, although “Canada” got thrown around. He turned back up when the draft ended. “We never should’ve fought in that war, bro,” he said as we sat drinking beers too early in the day. “Wasn’t none of our business. How many of us died over there? How many? And for what?” I just nodded.


  Most of the time, he talked about his wife Debra. “How can these women change so? She was so shy when I met her, so quiet, and now I can’t even say anything in my own house. And the way she dressing these days. Tight clothes, short skirts. You think it’s for my benefit, bro? No, it ain’t.”

  Yeah, well, Eileen had changed too. “They’re never wrong,” I said. “Sometimes it’s like talking to a wall. The wall maybe hears what you’re saying, but it’s not going to change. And if you bang your head against it, you the only one going to get hurt.”

  Sunday afternoon, when they got back from church, we all piled into my Ford and drove to Aunt Veronica’s house, where the usual feast awaited us. Cornbread, greens, pork with barbecue sauce, potato salad, sweet potato pie. Aunt Veronica had learned to make the food her Tommy liked. After we ate, I would take Chris out to play ball in the yard, leaving the women alone. Chris went through the motions, catching and bouncing, though he probably would’ve been happier sitting in a corner of the den, drawing in one of those sketchbooks Eileen kept buying him. I felt a bit guilty for dragging him outside, but the women’s laughter and talk sometimes gave me a headache.

  Headaches. Just a little side effect of war. I never wanted to talk about it, as I said. Never told Chris about my time there. And now here I am writing all this down before my brain turns to mush, or soft-boiled rice. Just the thought twists my stomach. Rice. Morning, noon, and night. It’s stupid to feel so much hatred for a food, but in the end you can’t help it. Eileen loved her rice though. Fried, with beans, with peas, with sardines, with corned beef, with ketchup, with hot pepper sauce. But when she realised I couldn’t even watch her and Chris eating it, she cooked it only when I was at work. I usually came home to potatoes and macaroni for the starch. Even grits reminded me too much of rice. Yet, when Eileen got sick and the treatment made her food come back up all the time, I cooked rice for her. It was all she could keep down.